Here's why people lift the bride and groom on chairs during Jewish weddings

The Jewish celebratory dance called the horah involves dancing around in circles.

At weddings, the bride and groom are lifted on chairs in the middle of the circle.

It's all for the entertainment of the married couple.

If you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, you've probably witnessed what, to an outsider, might be a strange dance.

Everyone gathers around the bride and groom and dances around the couple in a circle. At some point, someone brings in some chairs for the couple to sit on, and a few of the stronger guests hoist them up into the air as people dance around them.

There are really two things going on here.

One is the circle dance, called the horah, a type of Israeli folk dance that originally comes from Romania. The other thing, lifting up the bride and groom, is all about singling them out for celebration and having fun — and it's not technically part of the horah dance.

The story of traditional Jewish dancing is a weird one. The Torah (otherwise known as the Old Testament) and Talmud (another foundational Jewish text) reference dancing on different occasions. Dancing is an important component of celebrating specific life occasions — like weddings and bar and bat mitzvot — as well as holidays.

But the exact type of Jewish dances differed after the Romans exiled the Jews from the land of Israel in 70 CE. From then on, the types of Jewish dances evolved, according to the International Encyclopedia of Dance, with different traditions according to different cultural expressions.

Yemenite Jews carried on intricate dances, many of which are still practiced today. Hasidic Jews developed dances that displayed ecstatic fervor in celebration of God. And an influential 12th-century rabbi called Maimonides noted that "a Jewish bride in Egypt executed a sword dance, as was the habit in Muslim society when entertaining wedding guests of both sexes."

In one section, the Talmud makes a reference to dancing "before the bride." The exact meaning of that phrase is argued over, but one of the ways it's practiced today is by dancing before the bride and groom to entertain them.

Or, put simply, it's all for fun.

The question, of course, is how to entertain the bride. One rabbi cited in the Talmud was said to lift up the bride and put her on his shoulders, but other rabbis discouraged that practice because it appears to objectify the bride.

So when exactly did entertaining the bride turn into lifting the bride and groom on chairs? The answer, Jewish dance scholar Judith Ingber told INSIDER, "is lost in the mist of time." But over the years, she's noticed that people have become practical about it.

"I have seen chairs for religious brides and grooms with small wooden handles on the chair seats," Ingber, the editor of "Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance," wrote in an email. "They can literally hang on as they are hoisted up and carried aloft in a kind of dizzying turning and lifting."

The couple also often hold ends of a handkerchief as they dance around the room. Provided by Harold S. Summers

For Orthodox Jews, the chairs also provide a functional purpose. Orthodox Jews generally don't have men and women dance together. Instead, they dance in separate groups with what's called a mechitza — a sort of (often portable) partition wall — between then. If the bride and groom are lifted up on chairs on their respective sides of the mechitza, they can see each other during the dancing.

In the past few decades, picking up people on chairs during Jewish weddings has become part of pop culture, whether in "Fiddler on the Roof" or in the season five finale of "New Girl." It also isn't just a wedding thing anymore— the chair thing is often done for a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. It's a way for the guests to express their joy about the person being celebrated.